Spelling Stages & New Literacies

Stage 2 example

            After reviewing some of my second graders writing I found that my students were mostly at stage 2 and stage 3 in their spelling development.  An example of a stage 2 student consisted of the child abbreviating some of the words in his writing as well as mixing up some consonant sounds.  For the word “good” the student cut off the ending and just wrote, “go” and for the word “over” the student wrote “owver”. Nevertheless, the student still shows signs that phonemes are represented in words and letters by correctly spelling high frequency words such as: my, mom, me, up, said, and can.   A literacy center where a student hears a variety of words from either a tape, or a computer, and then having the student write down the word they hear could help them practice writing down exactly what they hear when the word is pronounced correctly.  Then after each word is pronounced the student could have a minute or two to write down the word before the auditory recording of the word is spelled out.  The student would then of course be required to write the correctly spelled word (if they spelled the word incorrectly) over their spelling of the word.  This way the students can see where they are misspelling sounds.  This would also help the teacher evaluate the sounds in words that students have trouble with. 

Stage 3 example

             An example of a stage 3 student consisted of the child correctly spelling short vowel words like “he” and “in”.  The student also correctly spelled some long vowel words such as: said, saw, and arm.   However, the student struggled with the word “punch” by spelling it “poncht”.  The student also misspelled the word “trouble” by spelling it “chrobrl”.   I believe a literacy center involving common blends would help of the students in this stage of spelling.  The students could have a chart to look at with a variety of common blends and they would have to match a stack of cards with words written out consisting of these blends at the beginning of the word with the blends on the charts.  If some students finished this task quickly, they would then be required to write out additional words that they would have to come up with on their own that could fall under the blended sound categories.

New Literacies Venn Diagram